Bird & VRF on Linux

[Ondrej Zajicek]

On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 12:42:23PM +0200, Tim Weippert wrote:
> HI all, 
> 
> currently i'm playing with Bird & VRF on Linux Kernel >4.9. I try to
> investigate if it is possible to build up an system which use Bird/BGP
> to populate the VRF/Tables.
> 
> I tried to run on bird instance and use the described feature of running
> it in the default context and build up peerings within the sample VRF.
> 
> As i can configure bird to try to build the Peerings with the correct
> interfaces/VRFs it seems no packet is send "through" the VRF or the
> listen socket is not working in this scenario (refused).
> 
> My question is, is Bird capable to cope with the VRF Implementation in
> newer Linux Kernels? Has any one tried this?

Hi

There is small thread about it:

http://bird.network.cz/pipermail/bird-users/2017-March/011055.html

The offered patch is in Git in master branch, but not in the last
released 1.6.x branch.


I thought about full VRF support for BIRD, my ideas are like:

1) VRFs defined in BIRD config. They are matched with VRF devices in kernel.

2) Instead of having one pool of interfaces, interfaces are automatically
split to VRFs based on kernel scan.

3) Protocols (and routing tables) have option 'vrf', which assigns them
to appropriate VRF, which means they only consider interfaces from that
VRFs, resolve neighbors inside that VRFs and their sockets are bound to
that VRFs.

4) Some specific protocols (e.g. pipe) could be associated with multiple
VRFs.

Any comments?

-- 
Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo

Ondrej 'Santiago' Zajicek (email: santiago at crfreenet.org)
OpenPGP encrypted e-mails preferred (KeyID 0x11DEADC3, wwwkeys.pgp.net)
"To err is human -- to blame it on a computer is even more so."